EDMUND WHITE Inside a Pearl: My years in Paris. Reviewed by Walter Mason

Tags: Edmund White/ James Lord/ Marcel Proust/ Marie-Claude de Brunhoff/ Paris/ Phyllis Rose/ Queer culture

Telling stories he shouldn’t: the gossipy, titillating and always fascinating world of Edmund White’s Paris.

There is something deliciously circular about Edmund White’s fiction and memoirs. I have been reading them constantly since I was a teenager in the late 1980s, and the recurring themes and stories have become like old friends. And, in the best tradition of dinner-table raconteurs, White’s stories are never boring in the retelling. They simply become more layered, or, enigmatically, more pared back in each book. But always, always different and always wildly entertaining. That is part of the charm and immense fun of his latest book, Inside a Pearl, a memoir of his Paris years. It is precisely like going for cocktails with one’s oldest and most beloved friend. You know exactly what you are in for, and you know you will love every moment and never want it to end.

White’s Parisian exile has been written about extensively in his novels The Married Man and The Farewell Symphony. The incredible stories and set pieces in those works of fiction are seared into my memory, and their retelling here as unadulterated fact comes as no surprise. White has never been much of a one for respecting the boundaries between fiction and autobiography. In this book he is developing a photographic image of the characters he had previously painted with such alluring colour.

The heroine of the piece is Marie-Claude de Brunhoff, a fearsomely stylish artist married into the clan of the creators of Babar the Elephant. Marie-Claude and White enjoy a strange sort of sexless romance, and she affords him entry into Paris high society. Her distant and slightly pathetic husband later breaks her heart by running off with American academic Phyllis Rose, a woman White introduced them to. This is the sort of thing that always happens in his world.

Inside a Pearl is gossip raised to a literary height, the sort of thing that would make Warhol and Capote scream with pleasure and furious with jealousy. White becomes giddy with name-dropping, and as each page is turned the reader is alerted to another elevated name: Yves Saint Laurent (chain-smoker), Marina Warner (uncomfortable with gays), Nigella Lawson (extravagant with flowers) and on and on it goes, titbits like a literary scrapbook of celebrity, much of it obscure, all of it camp, and none of it ever boring.

During 20 years in Paris White became great friends with James Lord, a wealthy American Francophile, memoirist and patron of the arts. Lord was a discreet gay man of an older school, one who adored art and culture and surrounded himself with carefully selected attractive working-class men who served mysterious functions in his household. Through this friendship White meets some truly fascinating people, including Paloma and Claude Picasso. As a young man Lord had been a friend of Cocteau’s and had spent a lifetime cultivating friendships with the greatest of the French avant-garde. Through his eyes White sees the shift in Queer culture, from the delicate aestheticism of the early 20th century to a more aggressive and masculine hyper-sexuality focused on the body rather than the mind:

I wondered if the lack of general culture he encountered in young people – what he’d spent his own youth acquiring – wounded and deeply irritated him.

And of course, White himself has become the thing he once recorded with such anthropological care. This book itself is a paean to a lost Queer culture, one more rightly called ‘gay’. White’s encyclopaedic and historical references have also become lost, things of a distant homophile past. His own reservoir of story, anecdote and scandal is its own remnant of days gone by. White’s 1970s and 80s are as much a kitschy historical setting as the 1920s and 30s were for his generation of gay men.

White’s closeness to French culture, and his long association with Paris, mean he can get away with making wonderfully broad generalisations about its people. His admiration for the French is made truer by his occasional gripe and by his level-headed assessment of social nuance:

Unlike Americans – who claim everyone they know a friend – the French were quite sparing of who deserved to be called un ami. The French had an entire taxonomy for friendships. There were acquaintances (connaissances) and then buddies (potes) and companions (copains) … A true friend could be called at any time, day or night. He would never bad-mouth his friend – or brag about their link if the friend was well known.

Quite where this leaves White the author as friend is hard to ascertain, as Inside a Pearl is one big bad-mouthing brag about all of his potes and their various copains. I have a feeling he’ll be forgiven, though, as he has been by generations of friends who are slightly titillated by being rendered as characters in his books, their stories, sex lives and reading habits immortalised in the White-ean universe that occasionally strays into Proustian territory. It is no surprise that White himself is an enormous Proust fan, and the author of an exquisite little biography of that author (Marcel Proust: A life – rush out and get it now, even before you read this book).

Edmund White is a writer who emerged at exactly the right moment in time. Accessible, warm and companionable, he was the little brother who gave a human face to gay liberation, the sturdy big brother who chronicled the age of AIDS, and now, in his dotage, the corpulent gay uncle who gets a little tipsy and tells stories he shouldn’t. He is a creature precisely of his age, and so his encounters with other, perhaps less well-remembered, writers broaden his readers’ literary and intellectual scope. Don’t worry if you haven’t heard of this old queen or that angry young man – Uncle Edmund is here to introduce them and explain them with a catty or titillating story that is always exactly the right length. After just a few pages I had to start reading Inside a Pearl with a pencil and pad by me – there were just too many fascinating people I had to learn more about.

Old-fashioned qualities like graciousness, forgiveness and tolerance are all revived by White, who is likely to buy a critic a bottle of champagne and a slap-up dinner at one of Paris’s finest restaurants. Reading this book made me buoyant with the possibilities of a life led with an eye to constant reinvention but still moored in a painstaking nostalgia. White’s writing has become a memorial to the resuscitated reputations of the late and great who have rendered the world so utterly fabulous. Inside a Pearl evokes a mythic France that smells of iris-root, is impeccably decorated, and populated with a dazzling cast of the clever and the beautiful. And once I’d finished it I wanted to go straight back to the beginning and start all over again.

Edmund White Inside a Pearl: My years in Paris Bloomsbury 2014 PB 272pp $29.99

Walter Mason is a writer, spiritual tourist and a lifelong dilettante. He is the author of Destination Saigon: Adventures in Vietnam (2010) and Destination Cambodia: Adventures in the Kingdom (2013). You can visit his blog here.

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